Had you seen some of the press interviews heralding Dutch comedian Hans Teeuwen’s London run, in which he intelligently and passionately advocated the absolute right to freedom of speech following the murder of his friend, the controversial filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, you might expect his show to be a biting, incisive polemic about the word’s biggest issues.

If, on the other hand, you saw his often electrifying performance in the Amsterdam Underground Comedy Collective at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe, or internet clips of the Nostradamus song for which he is probably most famous, you might expect an evening of high-octane silliness.

What you might not be prepared for, however, are the huge swathes of boredom that wash over you during this sluggish 90-minute show.

There’s no doubt that Teeuwen is an awesome performer, possessing a wide array of talents – and excelling at them all. This is evident from the moment he comes on, hilariously, as a nervous, tongue-tied rookie stricken by crippling stage fright, to his virtuosic jazz-piano playing, to the evocative physicality of his mimes, to the medley of songs featuring his own name to which he closes.

His stagecraft is so exemplary, that he can hold an audience in silence, just as easily as he can make them erupt in laughter. The problem is he does far too much of the former, and precious little of the latter.

This is show of fragmented, theatrical set pieces, all with a daft edge, rather than free-flowing stand-up. His favourite device is the drawn-out shaggy dog story, stretched to beyond breaking point as he delves obsessively into some irrelevant digression, picking some already trivial detail apart to the minutest degree. The joke is that this becomes far more important to him than any narrative – until it becomes an intolerable stand-off, him seeing how far he can push our patience, as our attention wanes under his relentless attrition.

So his rambling, surreal epics about a would-be fireman stumbling through life, or of a voyage to the ocean depths in a submersible spacecraft quickly peter away to nothing – yet he’ll persist with the nonsensical filibustering despite the audience starting to slumber.

Occasionally, he awakens from that reverie with a sudden, violent blast of energy, like a Joe Pesci character unexpectedly bursting into terrifying life. This full-on passion, when harnessed to some inspired lunacy, is when Teeuwen shows us why he’s considered one of the top comedians in the Netherlands alongside the likes of other Dutch greats such as…. oh, I’m sure one will come to me at some point.

That trademark Nostradamus song is unforgettable, much as you might want to exorcise its frustratingly catchy refrain from your brain; his dithering over which type of film he prefers is a paragon of impotent frustration; while his sock-puppet sidekick taking a snack are all genuinely hilarious.

But these fleeting moments of heavenly brilliance, most of which were in the club set he showcased in Edinburgh last summer, are ultimately lost under a mountain of uncomfortable, soul-sapping padding. And the less said about his graphic mime of a sex session, the better.

Though his show contains not one gram of political comment, Teeuwen says he will no longer perform in the Netherlands since Van Gogh was killed by Muslim extremists – thus leaving only the minority backwater of the entire English-speaking world as his potential new constituency. He is such a compelling performer that it would be unwise to think he won’t be able to crack it, should he choose. However this debut full-length show doesn’t offer nearly enough chuckles to think he’ll be immediately challenging any of our own homegrown comedy kings.

Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Soho Theatre, January 2008